A hard season is not automatically proof that you are failing. Sometimes it is showing you what you can carry, where an old strategy has reached its limit, or what has to change before the next version of your life can work.

In this episode, I talk about the mean voice in my own head, moving before I feel certain, and why evidence from your actual life can matter more than another motivational quote. I also look at what research on self-efficacy and adversity can and cannot tell us. Some difficulty can give us experience responding. Too much can overwhelm us. Not every painful thing is secretly a gift, and nobody owes gratitude to harm.

The useful question is not whether every struggle was good. It is what you know now because you lived through it, what you are carrying forward, and whether the strategy that helped you survive still belongs in the life you are building.

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What being strong actually feels like from the inside...

I was on a podcast this week, and before the host asked me what being strong means to me, she introduced me by telling pieces of my own life back to me. Twenty-six years in the mortgage industry. Building a company across thirteen states. Losing everything financially more than once. Losing my son. Rebuilding my life, my work and, in a lot of ways, myself.

It always gets me a little when somebody else says it, because when I say it, it is just my life. One thing happened, and then another thing happened, and then something else happened, and life kept going because that is what life does. You wake up the next morning. There are still decisions to make. There are still bills and children and work and people who need something from you. You do not normally stop in the middle of your own life and gather everything that has ever happened into one paragraph.

But when somebody else does, and I hear the whole thing the way another person must hear it, I have this moment where I think, damn.

That really is a lot.

Then she asked me, “What does being strong mean to you?”

Of course, I did what I always do when I am trying to understand what I actually think, which is sit down with a piece of paper and start writing. At first, I started making the obvious list. I lost Dylan when he was twenty-two years old in a freak car accident. I have lost many of the people who made up my family. My mortgage company was crippled more than once. I have moved across the country and started over. I have built multimillion-dollar companies. I homeschooled my boys. I published two books. I have started things, lost things, rebuilt things, walked away from things and kept moving through seasons when not moving would have made complete sense.

The list is long, and honestly, sometimes I impress myself.

But the more I looked at it, the more I realized that the list is what strength looks like to somebody standing outside of my life. It is the evidence people gather after everything has already happened, when they can look backward over the story, point to everything I survived and say, “She is strong.”

That is not what strength feels like when you are living inside of it.

From the inside, I think strength feels like a hallway.

There is a life behind you that you can still see, and there is another life somewhere in front of you that you can almost imagine, but you are standing in the middle and both doors are closed.

Sometimes you chose the hallway. You left the relationship, the job, the organization, the city, the family dynamic, the business or the version of yourself that you could no longer keep being. Other times, you did not choose any of it. Something happened. Somebody died. The money disappeared. The company changed. The future you had already pictured was taken away, and suddenly you were standing there whether you wanted to be or not.

Either way, the old door is familiar.

Even when what was behind it was not good for you, you know how to live there. You know the people. You know the rules. You know what is expected from you. You know the version of yourself you have to become to fit back inside of it, and there is something strangely comforting about knowing exactly how much of yourself you would have to give up to belong there again.

The new door is closed too, except that one is unfamiliar, and that is why the hallway sucks.

You do not know when the new door is going to open. You do not know exactly what is behind it. You do not know whether the business will work, whether the people will come, whether the podcast will grow, whether the money will return, whether the new community will find you, whether the new relationship will arrive, or whether the life you can see in your mind is actually waiting for you anywhere outside of your own imagination.

Nobody can promise you that if you keep walking, everything you are hoping for will be on the other side.

And in the meantime, nobody is applauding because there is nothing visible to applaud yet.

You can start a podcast and have five people listening. You can build a business before you have the clients. You can leave an environment you know you have outgrown and still feel left out when you see everybody carrying on without you. You can know with every logical part of yourself that leaving was the right decision and still miss being inside of something, still miss being known there, still miss having a place where people expected to see you.

I think that is the part we skip when we tell people to be strong.

We make strength sound like certainty, as though the strong person walks away and never looks back because she knows the future is going to be better, and I do not think that is how it feels at all. Sometimes you look backward constantly. Sometimes you miss people you know you cannot keep walking beside. Sometimes you are sad and lonely and completely unconvinced that any of this is going to work.

Strength is not gaslighting yourself into being happy in the hallway or repeating that everything happens for a reason until you no longer feel what you lost. Sometimes strength is simply being able to tell yourself the truth: I miss what was behind me. I do not know what is ahead of me. I am lonely here. I wish the next door would open so I could have some evidence that I made the right decision.

And I am still not going back.

Maybe I understood the hallway long before I had language for it.

My mother lived with paranoid schizophrenia, and for much of my childhood, it was just the two of us. She was institutionalized more than once. There were periods when she was homeless. There were things happening in our home that no child could possibly understand, so I did what children sometimes do when life does not make sense: I tried to become exceptionally good at everything I could control.

I was the little girl who tested into talented and gifted classes, danced, performed, overachieved and tried very hard to make sure the world saw that I was okay. Years later, I would understand that some of that excellence was not simply ambition. It was compensation. It was survival. It was a child trying to build structure around something that had none.

I spent years studying psychology, physiology, behavior and the mind because I wanted to understand my mother. I wrote a book called I Am Not My Mother because I needed to understand where her story ended and mine began. I never really blamed her. I knew she was sick. But I also learned that understanding why somebody behaves the way they do does not mean you can keep allowing their illness to determine your life.

At some point, I had to choose my children, and at some point, I had to choose myself.

That choice did not make me stop loving her. It did not make the loss of having a mother who could not really be my mother disappear. It meant I stopped walking backward into a life that required me to sacrifice the people I had become responsible for protecting.

That was one hallway.

Then Dylan died, and I found myself standing in the most impossible hallway of my life.

I do not think I am strong because my son died and I survived it. Losing him was not an accomplishment. It was not a test I passed, and it was not something that happened so I could become a more inspirational person. I would change it immediately if I could.

The strength was in all the ordinary decisions that came after it, when there was no dramatic transformation, no applause and no promise that I would ever feel like myself again.

People say all the time, “I could never survive losing my child,” and I understand what they mean. It is another way of saying the love is so enormous that the loss feels unimaginable. But when the unimaginable became my actual life, my mind did not experience it as permission to stop living.

I still had another son.

Destin still needed his mother, and I wanted to be a pillar for him—not a woman who pretended she was never devastated, but a woman who allowed herself to be devastated without deciding that the devastation had to become the rest of both of our lives.

I cried. I still cry. I gave myself the space to fall apart when I needed to fall apart, and I did not demand that grief become beautiful or productive. But I also understood that emotion moves. It changes shape. It becomes louder and quieter. It revisits you in ways you did not expect. I could feel it without handing it complete authority over every decision I would ever make again.

I am not telling anybody else how to grieve. I do not know what somebody else needs, how long they need it, or what their life feels like from the inside. I am only telling you what I knew about me.

I knew I could stay in bed, disappear inside the grief, and almost nobody would blame me.

Or I could stand in the hallway and choose a life I could not see yet.

That did not mean choosing a life without Dylan. He is woven through everything. It meant choosing to carry him with me instead of making his death the place where every other part of my life had to end.

Maybe creating has always been one of the ways I move through things. I am a creator, not a consumer. I write. I build. I start companies. I ask questions. I turn ideas over until I understand what I believe about them. Sometimes I have wondered whether creating is how I have grieved my entire life.

Dweewoo came from Dylan. The books came from trying to give language to things that felt impossible to hold. The company I am building now existed in some form before he died, and that matters to me because people sometimes think I became a different person after I lost him, as if grief invented this version of me.

It did not.

It changed me deeply, but I had already started walking toward her.

About nine months before Dylan died, he and I had one of those long conversations we used to have, where we could talk for hours and move through ten subjects without either one of us thinking we had left the original conversation. He told me that my journey would probably continue to get lonelier because I kept making choices about who I wanted to become.

I did not drink. I did not want a life built around things that did not feel good to me. I had ended relationships because I could see that the future the other person wanted was not the future I wanted. I had stepped away from rooms, jobs and organizations where I could have remained successful but no longer felt like myself.

Dylan could see that every time I made one of those choices, the group of people walking in exactly the same direction became smaller.

I wrote about that conversation on Facebook. At the time, it felt like one more beautiful conversation with my son. After he died, the date took on a weight I could never have understood when I wrote it.

But he was right.

For a long time, I would get almost all the way to the next door and then run all the way back down the hallway trying to bring everybody else with me.

I wanted them to see what I could see. I wanted them to grow with me. I wanted them to want what I wanted. I wanted to keep every relationship, every community and every version of belonging while still becoming whoever I was becoming, because I think some part of me believed that if I could bring everybody with me, moving forward would not feel so lonely.

It took me until my forties to understand that not everybody chooses that.

Some people are comfortable where they are. Some people are not asking the same questions. Some people are not trying to become the person you are trying to become. Some people genuinely like their lives, even when the life they are choosing would make me miserable.

That does not make them wrong, and it does not make me better. I cannot judge somebody else’s journey because I have never lived their life from the inside. What looks like fear to me may feel like peace to them. What looks stagnant from where I am standing may be exactly the stability they spent their whole life trying to create.

But I also cannot keep abandoning my journey because I am afraid to walk by myself.

I cannot keep reaching the next door, turning around and running back into the hallway to convince everybody behind me that they should want to come.

I think one of the biggest things I have learned over the last five or six years is that sometimes it is okay to just grab your own hand and walk.

Not angrily. Not because nobody else matters. Not because you have suddenly become so independent that you no longer need love, friendship or community.

You grab your own hand because you are the person who is actually there with you in the hallway. You are the one who knows what it cost to leave the old room. You are the one who knows how much of yourself you had already sacrificed trying to fit there. You are the one who has to live with the life you choose if you turn around, and you are also the one who has to keep believing in the life ahead of you before anybody else can see it.

Grabbing your own hand is not always some grand, cinematic act. A lot of it is ordinary.

It is waking up and paying attention to what is happening in your own mind before the rest of the world gets access to you. It is meditation. It is writing. It is keeping a gratitude list. It is checking in with yourself at the end of the day and asking, “Are you proud of you?”

I ask myself that every day, and I ask Destin too, because it does not really matter whether I am proud of him. I am his mother. I am going to love him no matter what. The more important question is whether he is becoming somebody he respects when nobody else is in the room.

I said on the podcast that probably eighty percent of my battle is cheering myself on, and I meant that literally.

My brain does not always offer me peaceful, wise, perfectly organized thoughts. My brain moves constantly. It imagines things. It remembers things. It tries to protect me from things that have already happened by convincing me that they are about to happen again.

After losing one son in a car accident, of course fear can tell me a thousand horrifying stories about my other son.

I could listen to all of them. I could call him constantly. I could try to control where he goes, what he does, how he drives, who he is with and when he comes home. I could make both of our lives smaller while telling myself that I was only trying to keep him safe.

Or I can hear the fear and understand exactly why she is there.

I do not have to shut her up. I do not have to pretend she is irrational or weak or inconvenient. I can listen to the scared version of me. I can tell her that she makes sense. I can give her space to speak.

She just does not get to make every decision.

That is part of the hallway too. Your subconscious mind is trying to keep you alive. It does not necessarily care whether you are happy, fulfilled, growing, loving freely or living the life you actually want. It cares whether today looks enough like yesterday that it can predict what happens next.

Familiar pain can feel safer than unfamiliar possibility, and that is why we sometimes go backward.

That is why people return to relationships, jobs, habits, identities and environments they already know do not fit them. It is not always because they believe the old life was good. Sometimes the known cost feels easier to tolerate than the uncertainty of a door that has not opened yet.

For a period of two or three years, I spent a lot of time alone. I am not telling anybody they need to copy my timeline. Maybe somebody else can find what I found in three months. Maybe another person needs longer. But for me, that solitude was one of the best things I ever gave myself because I finally became quiet enough to hear how many voices inside my head did not belong to me.

Other people’s expectations. The version of success that looked impressive from the outside. The things women are supposed to want. The things business owners are supposed to build. The last podcast I listened to. The last book I read. The last person who spoke confidently enough that I briefly mistook their certainty for my truth.

There were moments when I had to stop and ask myself, “Is this actually me, or is this just the last podcast I listened to?”

I had made a million dollars in a year. I had traveled. I had done the private-jet thing. I had built the company, checked the boxes and created a life that looked successful, and I still had to sit down with myself and ask, “What are you doing this for?”

Money matters. It creates choices. It removes pressure. It lets you help people. I am not pretending that it does not matter.

But money by itself was not enough to tell me whether the hallway I was walking down was mine.

I had to ask what actually lit me up. What made me happy. What work felt like the fullest use of me. What I would still be interested in if nobody were standing nearby to be impressed by it.

And then I had to give myself permission to change my answer.

While I was learning to hear my own voice, I also had to learn not to reject the versions of me who were scared, chaotic, angry, grieving or unsure. I spent a long time believing growth meant silencing those versions, getting them under control, and becoming calm enough and healed enough that they would no longer interrupt the woman I was trying to become.

Now I think listening to them is part of how I became her.

The five-year-old girl who needed somebody to make the world feel safe. The teenager who dreamed of becoming a graceful, warm, wise grandmother because she did not have that woman in her own life. The young mother who was trying to work from home and build a different life for her boys. The business owner who knew how to fight, produce, survive and prove herself. The mother who lost Dylan. The woman who still gets afraid something will happen to Destin. The woman building a new company before she has every piece of evidence that it will become what she can already see.

None of them had to disappear for me to become who I am.

I think that is why something I said near the end of the podcast stayed with me after we finished recording, because it came out of my mouth before I had really thought about how big the statement was, and when I heard myself say it, I knew immediately that it was true.

I said that if I could pick any person in the world that I wanted to be, I would pick me.

I know that can sound arrogant if you only hear the sentence by itself, because we are not really taught to talk about ourselves that way. We are allowed to say that we are proud of an accomplishment, or that we have grown, or that we finally like ourselves more than we used to, but saying that the one person you dream of being is you almost sounds like you think you have arrived somewhere and have nothing left to learn.

That is not what I mean at all.

I am still changing. I am still learning. I still have fears that do not make any logical sense and moments when my own brain tries to convince me that something terrible is about to happen simply because something terrible has happened before. I still make choices and wonder whether they were the right ones. I still build things that other people cannot see yet and then have days when I cannot see them very clearly either.

I am not saying I would choose some perfect, completed version of myself who never gets scared, never feels lonely, never misses anybody, never questions herself and never finds herself standing in another hallway.

I would choose me exactly as I am now.

The one person I dream of being is me.

And the part that makes me emotional is thinking about the five-year-old little girl I used to be, because if you could put every possible woman in the world in front of her and tell her that she could choose who she would grow up to become, I genuinely believe she would pick me out of the lineup.

She would not understand the mortgage company or the money or the number of states or the books or any of the other things adults use as evidence that somebody built a successful life. She would not care whether I had an impressive résumé or whether other people understood what I was building. None of those things would mean anything to her.

I think she would choose me because I became the woman she needed.

I became a mother who shows up. I became a woman who listens, who lets the scared version of herself speak instead of shaming her for being scared, who writes things down when life feels too large to hold in her head, who asks questions until she understands what she actually believes, and who finally learned that loving people does not require going backward every time moving forward becomes lonely.

She would see a woman who made a home for her children, who created things, who found ways to make life feel safe and interesting and expansive, and who never stopped believing that there was more to learn and more life to live even after life gave her plenty of reasons to become smaller.

And I think she would trust me.

That is the part that took the work.

The businesses took work too. The books took work. Raising my sons took work. Rebuilding financially took work. But becoming somebody that the little girl inside of me would trust required me to stop looking outside of myself for somebody else to tell me who I was supposed to be.

For a long time, I listened to everybody. I listened to what people thought success should look like, what women should want, what a business owner should build, how a mother should behave, how grief should look, how quickly I should recover, what I should forgive, what I should tolerate, what should matter to me and what should not.

I still listen to people. I am curious about almost everything, and I love when somebody introduces me to a way of thinking I had never considered. The difference is that I no longer assume something becomes true for me simply because somebody else said it beautifully.

I let it sit. I listen to all the versions of me who have something to say about it. I give myself enough space and grace to separate what I actually believe from what I have simply heard repeated often enough that it started sounding like my own voice.

That does not mean I always follow my voice perfectly. It means I know what it sounds like now.

I know when I am making a decision because it feels true for me, and I know when I am trying to make myself fit back inside a room simply because I do not want to be alone in the hallway.

I do not think the hallway ever completely ends. I am always building something, learning something, seeing something differently or realizing that a version of my life that once fit me does not fit anymore. Every time I become capable of imagining something new, there is another stretch of time between what I know and what has not arrived yet.

But I do not experience that middle in the same way anymore.

I used to think the point was to get through it as fast as possible, open the next door and finally have enough proof that I could relax. Now I think the point is that I trust the woman standing in there.

I know she might be sad. I know she might get scared and wonder whether she made everything harder than it needed to be. I know she may look backward and miss people and places and versions of belonging that were real and important to her.

But I also know that she is not going to abandon herself just because the next thing is taking longer than she expected.

That is what I was trying to explain when I said sometimes it is okay to grab your own hand and walk. I did not mean that you should never need anybody, or that strength is becoming so independent that nothing can hurt you. I have people I love. I have community now. I know what it feels like to be supported, and I also know that there are choices nobody else can make with you.

Sometimes everybody you love cannot come. Sometimes they do not want the same life. Sometimes they cannot see what you see yet. Sometimes you cannot even see it very clearly yourself.

And you still have to decide whether you are going to keep moving toward the woman you are becoming or return to a life you already know requires you to give up too much of yourself.

You are not dragging yourself down the hallway. You are not pretending you are fearless. You are simply refusing to leave yourself there because nobody else came back to get you.

After Dylan died, one of the hardest questions I had to wrestle with was, “What is life doing for me?”

I do not mean that his death was for me. I would never turn losing my son into some neat spiritual lesson about why everything happens. There are things that are simply devastating, things I would undo in a second, things that do not become good because something meaningful eventually grows beside them.

What I had to decide was whether the fact that I did not get to choose what happened meant I no longer got to choose anything.

And I do not believe that.

I could not choose the reality I received, but I could still choose whether I was going to keep participating in my own life. I could choose how I loved Destin. I could choose what I created, what I carried forward, what I refused to let disappear, and what kind of woman I wanted to become inside a life I would never have planned for myself.

That is what I mean when I say you get to choose your future.

I do not mean that you control every outcome, because obviously we do not. I do not mean that every closed door eventually opens simply because you believed hard enough or kept walking long enough. I mean that what happened to you does not automatically get to decide who you become next.

Other people may look at your circumstances and already have a story about what they are supposed to do to you. They may believe a loss should destroy you, a failure should embarrass you, a bad childhood should define you, or that leaving a familiar life should make you regretful enough to return.

But a lot of that is only their perception based on what they have been shown before.

You still get to decide what you see. You still get to sit with yourself long enough to understand what is true for you, and then make the next choice from there.

Maybe that is what being strong means to me. Not that I am never devastated, never afraid or never tired, and not that I have survived an impressive list of things and can now stand on the other side and explain how everybody else should do it.

It is that through every version of the hallway, I kept making choices toward the woman I wanted to become, even when I could not see her clearly and even when nobody else understood why I was going in that direction.

And somehow, after all of those choices, I became the person I would choose.

The one person I dream of being is me.

I think the five-year-old little girl I used to be would look down that entire lineup, take her time, see me standing there, and say, “Her.”

And honestly, after everything it took for us to find each other, I think becoming the woman that little girl would choose may be the thing I am most proud of.

If a decision keeps landing back on your desk, tell me what was decided, who was supposed to own the next move, and where it reopened.

What can the owner decide without additional approval? What information, budget, or access do they still need? What new fact would reasonably justify reopening the decision?

Bring the actual situation. We can look at what keeps sending the decision back uphill.

Some of the most important information that will change your life is information you do not know to look for. If something is outside your awareness, you cannot search for it, ask an expert about it, or even decide whether you disagree with it yet.

In this episode, I follow that thought through oral history, television, AOL, MapQuest, social media, algorithms, the way I have learned about my own body, and the way I homeschooled Destin. The tools changed, but the human impulse did not. We keep finding ways to move information beyond the person and place where it began.

This is not an argument that everything delivered by an algorithm is trustworthy. Judgment still matters. The part that fascinates me is the possibility that a question, interest, connection, or part of yourself can remain invisible until something places it inside your awareness.

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A leadership message can sound clear in the room and still leave everyone with a different understanding of what happens next. Before an important message goes out, people need to know the decision, why it matters, what changes, what stays the same, who owns the next move, and when they will hear more. Use this check before and after a consequential message: • Can people state the decision in one sentence? • Do they understand why it matters now? • Can they separate what changes from what does not? • Do owners know their authority, action, and deadline? • Are open questions labeled with an owner and date? • Is the written record available? • Is follow-up scheduled? • Has shared understanding been tested rather than assumed? The complete checklist includes a worked example, a before-message review, and follow-through guidance: https://www.michellevaughn.co/p/leadership-communication-checklist Where does leadership communication most often break down in your experience: the decision, the ownership, the boundary, or the follow-up?

Michelle Vaughn CoLeadership Communication Checklist | The AdvisoryPrepare consequential leadership communication, clarify decisions and ownership, anticipate questions, and close the follow-through loop.

Customers can feel the difference between someone who is answering them and someone who owns what happens next. In this episode, Michelle looks at why customer confidence often changes when the CEO enters the conversation and what a company has to transfer as it grows: context, standards, judgment, decision authority, and a clear recovery path.

Using Chick-fil-A, Costco, customer-trust research, frontline-service studies, and evidence from AI-assisted customer support, Michelle explains how a founder's intent becomes something a team can actually carry. AI can help people reach account history, policies, and examples faster, but people still have to verify the information, interpret the situation, and own the decision.

If customers routinely need a senior leader before they believe an issue is handled, the useful question is where context gets lost, authority gets stuck, or ownership disappears.

Everyone wants a season of victory and success, but I think a season of struggle, losing, challenges, and getting tested can be awesome because it shows you that you’re built to do hard things. It prepares you for victory and prepares you better for success, so when that success comes, you have a chance to grab it, hold onto it, and multiply it.

I’ve learned to enjoy the idea of welcoming struggle, even welcoming pain, because that’s how you get better. I love my losses, and that doesn’t mean there aren’t days when I still feel like a failure or an imposter. There are. That mean voice in my brain still tells me I’ve made too many mistakes, made a fool of myself too many times, or gone the wrong direction too many times to turn around and try again. I just decided to tell that voice to shut up.

The day everything changed for me was the day I stopped letting my feelings change my movement. On the days I don’t feel like doing it, I do it anyway. When I don’t feel good enough, I still do it. When I think I’m not smart enough, hardworking enough, or lucky enough, I still do it. I don’t need to feel differently before I move differently.

My losses have turned me into who I am today, and I’m proud of who I am because I’ve been through it. I know I can get through it, and I know I can do hard things because I’ve already done things I never thought I could do.

Stop treating struggle like it’s a bad thing. Change your perspective on what it’s doing for you. It’s either going to control you, or you control you.

It’s the only way.

Three things today. That's it.

What are you grateful for?

Michelle's health routine includes walking, strength training, sleep, recovery, magnesium, creatine, red light, a vibration plate, pressotherapy, Epsom salt baths, food choices, alcohol awareness, and mental and emotional regulation. Her pressotherapy routine goes back years: she uses it every morning for one hour on both her arms and legs and personally associates it with managing inflammation and feeling better. She explains which practices form the foundation, what job each additional tool is supposed to do, and where a person can realistically begin without copying her whole routine.

In this episode, Michelle explains what she does, the plain-language mechanism behind each practice, how family history shaped the way she thinks about health, and why tools and experts should add to a person's understanding rather than replace their participation. The conversation connects health to agency, household stewardship, business, leadership, and the life the body is being asked to carry.

This is not medical advice. It is Michelle's experience, her decision process, and what she has learned by paying attention to her own body.

Before the day gets away from us, what are your three things today?

Let's do our three things for today. What are three things you're grateful for right now?

What are your three things today?

Mine will be in the comments. Add yours when you're ready.

July’s housing report moved in more than one direction. Permits increased from June, while starts and completions fell. That does not tell one household whether to buy, sell, refinance, or wait.

What decision are you trying to make around home or money right now, and what information would actually help you make it?

Today's Advisory looks at four signals before a business changes its plan: demand, cash, capacity, and commitments. Which one would materially change the next decision in your business right now—and what evidence would you need before you changed course?

Read the full issue: https://www.michellevaughn.co/p/latest-economic-data-business-review

We're back for day two. What are three things you're grateful for today?

You can list them without explaining them. Big or small, they count.

Every day, let's list three things we're grateful for. They can be big, small, serious, ordinary—whatever is true for you that day.

I'll add mine in the comments. Add yours below when you're ready.

What are your three things today?

We judge old decisions using information the person making them did not have.

In this episode, I start with UWM and Two Harbors, then follow the same pattern through business, politics, conspiracy theories, and some of the biggest decisions in my own life.

The outcome tells us what happened. It does not automatically tell us whether the original decision was reasonable based on the information available at the time. This episode is about what happens when the reality you get is not the reality you planned for—and who you become while living inside the version that actually happened.

Watch the full video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/nqX7rCYMefo

Subscribe to The Observation Room and find everything I’m building at michellevaughn.co.

Michelle Vaughn shares how AI became part of her everyday life and business—and why useful support is different from handing a tool authority it has not earned.

Dylan introduced Michelle to AI in 2022. Since then, she has used it for meals, nutrition and macros; moving and travel decisions; product research and comparisons; household and car questions; preparing for appointments and conversations; processing situations; and organizing her thinking.

Inside Michelle Vaughn Co, AI supports research, strategy, websites, forms, offers, newsletters, customer experiences, business systems, podcast distribution, finding opportunities, and reducing repetitive work. Michelle also discusses AI agents, the extra work they can create when they act incorrectly, and the boundaries that matter once a tool can take action.

The through line: use AI to prepare, organize, compare, and see new angles while keeping judgment, responsibility, and final authority human.

I know I’m going against the popular opinion, but I don’t think UWM is at the beginning of the end. I actually think we’re watching what leadership looks like when something goes very wrong and you still have to figure out what comes next.

UWM made a very expensive mistake on the Two Harbors deal. There’s no reason to pretend otherwise. They lost hundreds of millions of dollars on a hedge connected to the failed Two Harbors deal, in an already volatile economic environment. The stock responded terribly, and they suspended the dividend. Those are facts. I’m not trying to rewrite them into something prettier.

(A hedge is basically insurance against something moving the wrong way financially. In this case, UWM was trying to buy Two Harbors, which owned a huge portfolio of mortgage servicing rights. Those assets can change value pretty dramatically when interest rates move, so UWM put on a hedge to protect itself if rates moved against the value of what it expected to buy. The problem was that UWM didn’t end up getting Two Harbors, but the hedge was still there. So instead of having the Two Harbors assets on one side and the hedge helping balance the risk on the other, UWM was left with the hedge by itself. Rates moved the wrong way for that position, and what was supposed to help protect a much larger transaction ended up creating a massive loss.)

Basically, they bought the insurance for the house before they actually owned the house, didn’t get the house, and then the insurance itself became very expensive.

But this is where my interpretation starts to separate from a lot of what I’m reading.

I keep seeing the fact that they raised capital being used as more evidence that UWM is in trouble, and I guess I’m looking at it from almost the opposite direction. If you know you just took a huge loss, you’ve already spent five years operating in one of the worst mortgage markets we’ve seen in a long time, and you have the ability to put enough capital into the company that you don’t have to spend the next year worrying about the next problem, why wouldn’t you do that?

Mat said on the earnings call that Oaktree is putting in $1.5 billion and the Ishbia family is putting in another $500 million. The money is expensive. Oaktree is getting paid well for taking the risk. Of course they are. They aren’t a charity. I don’t think that makes the transaction bad by itself. It means UWM needed capital and Oaktree negotiated a return for providing it.

What stood out to me more was that Mat is putting his own family capital back into the company too. He could have protected his own money, hoped the market got better, and tried to stretch things out. Instead, he put another $500 million behind the company he built and brought in a very experienced institutional partner at the same time. I think that says something.

I also don’t understand why making sure one bad decision doesn’t turn into an existential problem is somehow being treated like proof that the company is already dying. Would it be better if they never lost the money? Obviously. Would it be better if they didn’t need expensive capital? Sure. But that isn’t where they are now. The decision in front of them now is what to do after the loss happened.

That’s the part I find more interesting.

There is no version of building a company this large where every decision works. There is no CEO who gets every market call right forever. Especially not in an industry that has been this volatile for this long. It’s been a long five years. I think sometimes we get so used to studying successful people after everything worked that we forget they were making decisions in real time with incomplete information too.

Leadership can’t only mean never getting anything wrong. At some point something is going to go wrong. Sometimes very wrong. Then you have to decide whether you hide from it, keep pretending it isn’t happening, or deal with what is actually in front of you.

From what I can see, UWM is dealing with it.

And this is really why I think they can come out stronger. If the numbers Mat gave on the call hold, UWM is coming out of this with substantially less leverage, more liquidity, a new institutional partner that understands the mortgage and servicing business, and a much more painful understanding of where their risk controls failed. None of that makes the loss worth it, but it does mean the company on the other side of this could actually be financially stronger and better protected than the company that walked into it.

They raised capital. They’re lowering leverage. They suspended the dividend. They’re paying down debt and MSR financing. They brought in an institutional partner that understands the mortgage and servicing business. Mat put more of his own money in. None of that guarantees anything, but it doesn’t look like someone who has decided the company is finished either.

And I think we’re losing sight of the actual business underneath the stock chart.

UWM still originated almost $40 billion in mortgages last quarter. The stock falling does not make the operating company disappear. It doesn’t erase the technology, the people, the broker relationships, the servicing business or the scale they have built.

The Broker Channel Still Matters

I also think we’re losing sight of something much bigger than UWM’s stock price, and that is the actual business model underneath all of this.

UWM didn’t build its position on nothing. It built infrastructure around the independent mortgage broker channel, and that channel continues to matter because competition matters to consumers.

A borrower can go directly to one lender and get that lender’s products and pricing, or work with an independent broker who can compare options across multiple lenders. An analysis of federal mortgage data found that borrowers using the wholesale broker channel saved an average of $10,662 over the life of their mortgage compared with borrowers using the retail channel. Government research has also repeatedly shown that shopping mortgage offers can save consumers thousands of dollars.

That’s the part I don’t think changes because UWM had one bad quarter.

Consumers still need mortgages. Brokers still give borrowers access to competition. And UWM still has one of the largest infrastructures in the country built specifically to serve that channel.

I still believe the broker model is better for consumers because competition is better for consumers. I believed that before this quarter and I still believe it now. One bad hedge does not suddenly make that mission wrong.

I think that’s probably the biggest difference between what I’m seeing and a lot of the commentary right now. People are looking at the loss and calling it failure. I’m looking at what happens after the loss and deciding whether I think the company still knows how to move forward.

Those are not the same question.

Could this get worse? Of course. Could I look back at this in a few years and realize I completely underestimated something? Absolutely. That’s what makes observing something while it’s actually happening interesting. Anybody can explain the obvious answer once we already know how the story ends.

But right now, I don’t see a company giving up. I see a company that got hit very hard, made an expensive mistake, and then raised enough capital to give itself room to keep playing the game.

So when I say I would still bet on UWM, I’m not only betting on a company recovering from a very expensive mistake. I still believe in the business underneath it and the market it was built to serve.

Maybe we spend too much time studying how successful people win and not enough time paying attention to what they do when they lose one.

I think this one is worth watching.

And yes, I would still bet on Mat Ishbia and UWM.

When a decision feels impossible, the answer may not be missing. It may be crowded by other people’s opinions, old identities, fear, protection, and the pressure to explain.

In Episode 3 of The Observation Room, Michelle Vaughn explores how to create enough quiet to hear what you may already know—without giving away your authority or pretending uncertainty has disappeared.

In this episode:

• Why another opinion can make a decision louder

• The difference between perspective and handing away authority

• When explaining becomes negotiation

• Confusion versus inconvenience

• Why survival strategies deserve gratitude, not permanent authority

• Four questions for clearing the room around a decision

• Confidence without certainty

Chapters
00:00 The polished first answer
02:00 Why advice can make a decision louder
02:28 What if the answer is crowded?
03:59 Perspective versus giving away authority
05:58 The silence where the real conversation begins
07:48 When explaining becomes negotiation
09:25 Confusion versus inconvenience
10:55 What are you trying to protect?
11:50 Survival strategies and permanent authority
13:37 When protection becomes a prison
15:53 Four questions for clearing the room
18:50 Two crowded-decision examples
22:12 Confidence without certainty
24:21 A room quiet enough to hear yourself

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Subscribe and share this episode with someone who may need a little more room and a little less noise.

Today, Michelle Vaughn Co officially opened its doors.

The website is live. The first newsletter has gone out. The podcast and YouTube are up. And now this community is open for the conversations that continue after an episode, a letter, or an idea lands.

Some of you know me through business. Some through mortgage, leadership, writing, home, money, creativity, or life itself. You do not have to fit neatly into one category here. That is the point.

Come in and introduce yourself below. Tell us who you are, where you are joining from, and what brought you into the room—or simply say hello.

I’m very glad you’re here.

This is the place where everybody can come in, look around, introduce themselves, ask a question, share something they are working through, or continue a conversation that started somewhere else in Michelle Vaughn Co.

Some conversations will begin with the podcast. Some may come from one of the letters. Sometimes I may post something I noticed that does not belong neatly inside business, home and money, Love Notes, or The Observation Room. That can live here too.

You do not need to have the perfect question, and you do not need to turn your introduction into a résumé. You can simply tell us who you are, where you are joining from, what part of life or work you are in right now, and what brought you here.

This community has different rooms because people come to me for different things, but you do not have to figure everything out the first day. Start here. Join the conversations that interest you. Ask what you need to ask. Read quietly for a while if that is more your speed.

Nobody is taking attendance.

I am glad you are here.